Tool 92 · Develop yourself
A guided 15 to 19 minute conversation, here in TAIU. Some of what you carry was decided before you arrived. That is worth separating from what you have actually chosen.
Gratitude does not require continuation.
Would you choose it again, knowing what you know now?
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
People often talk about their background as though it explains everything or nothing, and it usually does neither.
Before anybody makes a decision, a lot has already been decided. What was normal, what was showing off, what money was for, what people like you were supposed to want.
None of that arrives with a label. It just feels like how people are, until you meet someone whose normal was completely different.
Origin and ownership are different questions. Where a rule came from doesn't settle whether it should stay, and I've watched people keep an inherited rule for entirely new reasons once they'd actually looked at it.
What you'll get
01
Where it came from
02
Whether it still fits
03
What you would keep
04
What follows
+
Your TAIU handover, a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
When you finish
This session works on you rather than one part of your life, so nothing is rated. At the end you are asked, once, which part of your life it touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
What now?
01 · Save it
Where this came from, in specific terms.
02 · Test it
Name one rule about money or status you have never actually examined.
What I would do
Name the rule in specific terms rather than a general feeling about your background.
Ask where it came from before asking whether it is right.
Separate gratitude for the people who gave it to you from an obligation to continue it.
Test whether it still fits your life now, not the life it was built for.
Let some of it stand unchanged if it genuinely still holds.
Test it
What was normal where you came from?
Why might it have made sense there?
Does it still fit now?
The alternative
The usual reading is that examining an inheritance means rejecting it, and that anybody who questions where they came from is ungrateful or embarrassed by it. Often the evidence shows the opposite. Somebody looks closely at a rule about money, or status, or what people like them are supposed to want, works out exactly why it made sense for the people who handed it to them and decides to keep it anyway, now for their own reasons rather than inherited ones. The reverse also happens. Somebody discovers that a rule they assumed was simply true was in fact local to one house, one town, one decade and it stops being a fixed feature of who they are.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →What helped you?
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Finished the exercise?
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Next tool
If the inheritance sits mostly inside one family
Further thinking
The Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel
Morgan Housel on getting rich versus staying rich
Shane Parrish with Morgan Housel
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
Book
Morgan Housel
Housel's argument is that financial behaviour is mostly not a maths problem. People handle money according to what they lived through, what they saw at home and what they are frightened of. Read it for the chapters on enough and on wealth being the money you do not spend, which are the two ideas this exercise keeps running into.
Podcast
Shane Parrish with Morgan Housel
A long conversation rather than an interview, and it spends most of its time on the part people skip: the difference between the behaviour that builds money and the behaviour that keeps it, and how much of both is inherited from the household you grew up in. Listen to it if the exercise turns up a childhood money story you had not thought about since.
Book
Jonathan Haidt
Haidt argues that moral judgement arrives first and the reasoning follows, assembled afterwards to defend a position already taken. That is uncomfortable reading if you believe you arrived at your worldview by thinking it through. It is also the single most useful corrective when you sit down to describe what you actually believe, because it makes you look for the origin of a conviction rather than only for the argument supporting it.
Book
Erving Goffman
Goffman watched ordinary social life the way somebody watches a play, and found that all of us run a front stage and a back stage. The front is not a lie. It is the working version of ourselves that a situation requires. Reading him takes most of the moral charge out of the question, and leaves a far better one behind: which of your performances is worth the effort it costs.
Book
Charles Taylor
Taylor's account of how the West moved from a world where belief was assumed to one where it is one option among many is long and demanding, and worth it. It explains why questions about what you hold true now feel like personal decisions rather than inherited facts, and why so many people find they cannot answer them without borrowing somebody else's vocabulary.